January 1987
American Purpose
Issue 1, Volume 1

Publication Date: January 1, 1987
Posted: Thursday, January 1, 1987

This issue includes, 'Our Purposes'; 'Orwell Lives'; 'The Peacemakers'; 'Breaking Ranks'; 'The Posner Problem'; 'Rightest Overtones'; and 'Back in the USSR'.


In This Issue :

AMERICAN PURPOSE, OUR PURPOSES
Beneath the surface of American public life a great debate is gathering. The great debate is not about the Strategic Defense Initiative, aid to the Nicaraguan resistance, international terrorism, or the viability of "third-force" alternatives to traditional authoritarians—although the great debate, as it evolves, will touch each of these immediate questions on the foreign policy agenda. The great debate is more fundamental: it is an argument over America's very purpose in the world.  [More]

ORWELL LIVES
One of the surest signs of trouble in any resistance movement is when its leaders begin to fudge the definition of "violence." Such was the case in America during the days of black power and on the woolier fringes of the anti-America-in-Vietnam movement. Such remains the case in Latin America, where liberation theology's muddying of the moral waters by distinguishing between the "first violence" of poverty and the "second violence" of those who would resist it through armed force in the name of social justice has led, inter alia, to American religious leaders' support for the repressions of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.  [More]

THE PEACEMAKERS
The Nobel Committee has helped make October a nervous month by some of its recent choices for the Peace Prize. We think, in the first instance, of last year's award to International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, one of whose founders, Dr. Yevgeny Chazov, has been a persecutor of the 1975 Peace Prize laureate, Andrei Sakharov. Then there were the bizarre circumstances of the 1981 award to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees that, as the London Economist put it, "helped fish the victims of Nobel laureate Le Duc Tho [the 1973 Peace Prize winner] out of the South China Sea."  [More]

BREAKING RANKS
It is no longer news (although it is often treated as such) when a church group urges disinvestment in South Africa. It is news when a prominent religious leader challenges the common wisdom on what constitutes the best path to a future of freedom and prosperity for all the peoples of South Africa. Such a challenge has been mounted by Bishop John T. Walker of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C.  [More]

THE POSNER (AND ARBATOV AND GERASIMOV) PROBLEM
Last spring, after President Reagan's televised address to the nation on his proposed 1987 defense budget, the networks provided the traditional response time to the Democratic Party, represented in this case by House Majority Leader Jim Wright. ABC News, however, varied the response format considerably by also giving rather a lot of air time to Vladimir Posner, who is often described as a "Soviet journalist" but who is, of course, a functionary of the Soviet state. ABC's own John McWethy noted, after Posner had called the president a liar in so many words, that Posner's appearance reflected the openness of American society and thus highlighted, by contrast, the closed state of affairs in the USSR. Other reactions weren't quite so charitable. The president wondered aloud what was going on, while White House Communications Director Patrick Buchanan queried, in a publicly released letter to ABC News president Roone Arledge, whether, on the ABC/Posner model, the British should have allowed Dr. Goebbels to respond to Churchill's speeches in favor of British rearmament.  [More]

"RIGHTIST OVERTONES." INDEED
Being "in the center" is usually considered desirable in American public life. "Middle-of-the-road" carries with it images of the tolerance, decency, and reasonableness that Americans admire. But where is "the center" these days? Well, that depends on where you think the poles of the argument are.  [More]

BACK IN THE USSR
Ever since the Geneva summit, there has been intense interest in "citizen exchange" programs with the Soviet Union. In light of that interest, we share the following report of our James Madison Foundation colleague, Holt Ruffin, who is executive director of Seattle's World Without War Council. Ruffin traveled in the USSR for two weeks last July, and wrote in Steady Work:  [More]